A tire manufacturer seeks to design a tire tread which not only fulfills its function relating to wear, wet and dry traction, rolling resistance, and other desirable properties, but which also operates with a acceptably low noise level. Preferably, the tire should run at an acceptable noise level through the entire operating range of a particular vehicle on which the tire is to be mounted. It is therefore necessary to evaluate a tire for noise acceptability. Historically, this has been done by hand cutting a set of tires or building a mold to produce a set of experimental tires for evaluation. These tires are normally loaded and normally inflated and then run against a surface at a predetermined speed during which time the tire noise is measured. This process is expensive and time consuming, thus limiting the number of trials available to the design engineer to optimize the tire design.
A number of methods for predicting the noise level of a specific tire design have been developed for a running tire. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,788,651 and 5,295,087 relate to methods of simulating noise generated by a tire with a computer. However, none of the conventional noise simulators take into account the effect of the aspect ratio of the tire in analyzing the construction of a tire with regards to the level of noise it generates.